Brian Jud is the Executive Director of the Association of Publishers for Special Sales. In this post, he reveals some best practices around book pricing.

When sales decline, many publishers immediately lower their prices to seek new sales. This tactic can hurt short- and long-term profitability. A better tactic is to maintain a higher price and re-positioning your products. Perhaps the best source of ideas for doing that is your target buyers.

A good example is hard to find in the publishing industry, so let’s look at Hyundai. As the economy faltered in the recent recession (2008 – 2009) consumers delayed major purchases, especially cars. Most car companies slashed prices and offered cash-back offers.

In this article, Penny Sansevieri makes predictions around the new book marketing best practices.

For those of us who market authors for a living, we know that 2013, more than any other year, saw bigger changes in marketing books. More in fact, than any prior year. The changes are largely due to the number of books that have come online both in print and digital and, in some cases, in digital only. In fact, the latest figures for books published daily are staggering. Bowker reported that in 2012 there were 3,500 books published each day in the US; this number does not include eBooks since many of them are often published straight to Amazon without ISBN numbers or other means of tracking. It’s a perfect storm for change.

A new analysis of U.S. ISBN data by ProQuest affiliate Bowker reveals that the number of self-published titles in 2012 jumped to more than 391,000, up 59 percent over 2011 and 422 percent over 2007. Ebooks continue to gain on print, comprising 40 percent of the ISBNs that were self-published in 2012, up from just 11 percent in 2007.

“The most successful self-publishers don’t view themselves as writers only, but as business owners,” said Beat Barblan, Bowker Director of Identifier Services. “They invest in their businesses, hiring experts to fill skill gaps and that’s building a thriving new service infrastructure in publishing.”

Recently Bowker released statistics on self publishing over the past 5 years, which were also the topic of a presentation at Frankfurt Book Fair.

Looking at these statistics, one might think that self publishing is a new phenomenon. However, we have put together some videos that show self published author experiences over the past 30 years. The difference now is the ease of the process as well as the mass volume that an author can sell in a short period of time.

In addition, these authors tell several different ways that self publishing leads to traditional publishing either through obtaining a book contract or starting a company that publishers other authors.

Via Joanna Penn, a podcast with Matthias Matting, who has just finished translating his book "How to Self Publish in Germany" into English. If you are interested in selling your book overseas, in other languages, this guide will help you understand some of the pitfalls of publishing into another culture. While many factors of the book market in Germany are similar to those of the US, there are some distinct differences (such as the fact that more Germans are book consumers than are Americans, or the fact that German law governs book pricing).

As the publishing world knows in altogether too much detail, WH Smith (the UK bookseller) has closed its website because it has discovered some self-published erotica books that were classified as children's books.

There's no word on when Smith estimates re-opening. As it is, they are losing millions of dollars in lost sales. But it turns out the problem runs even deeper than one of bad metadata. It seems that many of these self-published authors were deliberately mis-categorizing their books.

Once upon a time, self publishing print books was a costly and risky endeavor. Minimum orders, inventory risks, and lengthy lead times were not self-publisher friendly. Then, print on demand came along. POD creates one-off and entire print runs of bookstore-worthy hard copies from a “print-ready PDF” hours after an order is placed (i.e. when you place an order with the printer or when a customer purchases a copy on Amazon).

The ease and affordability of digital publishing makes for a great starting point for self publishers, but there are plenty of reasons to go print as well. To name a few...

Are subjects important? Will incorrect subjects on an ISBN have a big impact on its distribution? This is a very broad question that can either be answered with a word ("yes") or a dissertation. We will try for something in between.

Just as providing correct title, author, publisher, and pricing information is important, correct subjects are important if you want your book to be properly represented in the marketplace. They are an integral part of providing well-formed metadata about an ISBN. Leaving book discovery to keyword searching and title scanning alone is not enough because keywords often retrieve "false positives" and because the subject of a book is not always self-evident from the title: "Orange is the New Black" is not about fruit or color theory, and "The Glass Castle" is not about architecture.

Your ISBN, or International Standard Book Number, is a key tool to getting discovered by the people who buy eBooks. What is it really? This 13 digit number is used by the publishing industry to organize all printed, audio and digital books worldwide. The specific facts that a self-publishing author provides to register a title’s ISBN with Bowker are its Metadata.

Let’s look carefully at the information required for Section One of an ISBN registration using different published works as examples.

Section One: Title and Cover

1. Title: Confessions of an eBook Virgin

2. Subtitle: What Everyone Should Know Before They Publish on the Internet

Make sure these fields are EXACTLY the same, including upper and lower case, as what is seen on your cover and cover page.